At
the courthouse at 10:10 a.m., with Henry S. to
carry the box of xerox copies. A dozen press and TV
cameramen prowl outside the main entrance. I ham it
up for them, tucking Gatley
on Libel and Slander
under my arm, etc.

Arriving at the Law
Courts

As I
cross the great hall, a court reporter from another trial
catches up with me, all flustered, and says that all the
court reporters are solidly behind me. "You are putting up a
fight for a lot of people who think just the same as you,"
she says. From her further remarks, before I outpace her, I
take it that she finds the Holocaust propaganda campaign
endlessly boring.

The
Court 73 is packed to overflowing and a hundred people are
still lining up outside. I spy many famous faces -- I see
Thomas Stutterford of the The
Times
again, and his p.a., my interesting friend Rebecca
Wallersteiner; there is Rabbi Hugh
Gryn's
daughter too. I chat with Neal Ascherson of The
Observer; I say I am going to mention him in my speech, and
his 1981 review of UPRISING
("A Bucketful of Slime"), but when the time comes I decide
to skip the paragraph and carry on.

The
Usher in her black robe is dashing around clucking like a
chicken, marshalling people into the public and press
galleries. "One more seat here, no Sir that's a press seat,
that's all, I'm afraid." The House Full sign goes up, the
doors are locked. Then "Silence. All rise!" and the judge
comes in.

For a
few minutes there is a discussion of procedures and
formalities. I have put in a list of five outstanding
points, but there is general agreement to hold them until
the end of the speeches.

Rampton's
speech
is short, about an hour, and as predictable as Adolf
Hitler's "my prophesy in 1939 about the Jews" gramophone
record. I spend the hour ignoring him with all but half an
ear, and trimming down my own speech in line with the
Judge's hints expressed yesterday. Rampton brings in all the
facts I have predicted, which makes my own prepared response
even more of, well, a response.

Mr
Justice Gray asks him a few questions, bitingly
inquiring about the point or relevance of some of his
statements, then invites me to begin my closing speech. To
show who is in command here, -- nor the defendants, but I --
I propose that the Court may wish first to adjourn for five
minutes: It is an optical device, but I deem it necessary. I
wish to make adjustments to the speech which have been
proposed this morning by the defendants, I
indicate.

Five
minutes later, we resume. My "bridging-the-gap" introduction
this time (that is, setting up a spark across the gap
between myself and the audience) is Gallipoli. "It is rather
like going over the top at Gallipoli, my Lord," I commence,
not much louder than a murmur. "My father was there, he was
at Gallipoli." (Aboard one of the bombarding British battle
cruisers, so he probably had it rather cushier than the
gentlemen who were ashore, that is true. But he was at
Jutland also, in May 1916, and that was not a picnic
either).

Once
or twice I break away from the prepared text -- once,
mentioning Professor Richard Evans, to assure the
court that despite all, I bear him no personal animus; but
he still gets a well-deserved mention when the time comes.
And once I pause, when we come to the figures, to say,
genuinely, that when we talk of 300,000 here, one million
there, we must never overlook that we are dealing with real
people who have suffered, it is 300,000 times one, so to
speak, and I feel for each and every one of them in their
suffering, wherever they suffered. "I am on the side of the
Innocents." When I refer to a press report in
The
Jewish Chronicle,
I half turn to the press gallery and utter unscripted words
of commendation for that newspaper which has consistently
produced the best U.K. reporting on the trial. All of these
remarks are quite honest, and it is odd that it should need
saying.

There
are many, many friends in court this day, as the response to
much of what I say makes clear. Each time I deliver a homily
on the true meaning, or meaning-in-this-context, of German
words like "Schrecken" or "als Partisanen", I throw a
playful but baleful glare at Eva Menasse of the
Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung,
who I know will not like it all. She confirms that she does
not, and professes herself shocked at my, well, chutzpah, in
putting those meanings to those words. With 104 pages to
read, I finish on the nose at 4:30 p.m.

For a
while the Judge continues with legal matters; Rampton asks
if we can have a week's advance warning of the date that
judgement will be given, so he can round up the same press
galère from all over the world. I spot Kieling of
Die
Welt,
and there are reporters from Dagens
Nyheter
and most of the rest of the big European dailies too.

What
will they do if things go wrong? Rampton seems confident,
but then so am I. Judge Gray was unusually terse with him
today. At the end of the afternoon, after I had delivered a
mild protest after Rampton's second or third interruption of
my closing statement -- interrupting a closing speech is
traditionally not done, as I have the right to the last
word, literally -- Judge Gray was heard to state tersely to
Mr Rampton that his team's sotto voce "over-reactions" on my
speech were undesirable.

As
we leave I pass in the corridor Laura Tyler, of Mishcon de
Reya [attorneys to Deborah Lipstadt, seen on left
with her London publisher], and I jokingly thank her for
having sent to me last April those "three videos" belonging
to them when she returned my own tape collection. (The
unedited footage that they contain has enabled me to refute
much of the Halle legend.) She flashes a smile that
threatens to meltdown the mind, and says sweetly that she is
glad to have helped. That is the only unsettling thing about
today: that Mishcon de Reya's staff, who have evidently been
brought in to the courtroom en masse as a company treat, are
in such corporate good humour.

The
press pack are waiting in the Strand as I emerge. More
hamming it up for them. It is a pity Benté is still
so ill that she can't attend. She would have really wowed
these press hounds, but she is a very private person and
even more so now.

I hit
the get-well sofa finally around 6 p.m., and I am out to the
world for three hours. At 9:40 I send this message to "the
Gang," my worldwide circle of consultants, including to
Michael Mills, the Australian civil servant who has helped
me so much with brilliant and well-researched history
briefs, and who is now under attack from the American and
Australian Jewish communities, and in New York's vintage
formerly Yiddish newspaper Forward,
for having done so (they are noisily demanding his dismissal
by the Australian government; but he has done no wrong, and
even Canberra cannot dictate what a civil servant thinks in
his spare time):

Gentlemen:

A brief report. Today was the day of closing
speeches. Mr Rampton spoke for an hour, a
24-pages
speech which I will post later.
Today's evening
paper is (surprise!) full of it. I
spoke for about five hours; totally exhausted. The
courtroom was packed with 200, standing room around
the walls, around 70 journalists from all over the
world; I handed out 25 copies of my speech and
nearly had my clothes torn off by journalists
trying to get it. The courtroom listened in total
amazement to my revelations of the pressures put on
me by the ADL
etc for 30 years, which the judge had allowed me
after all to report. I had argued that I considered
them highly relevant and admissible for various
reasons, and repeated that today.

I am now much more buoyant [...]
based on remarks by the judge. He challenged
Rampton at the end of the speech on racism, making
it plain that he thought it had no bearing whatever
in this trial. When I got to my page on the British
National party, he said I need not read it; I asked
if he was satisfied there was "no case to answer"
on that, and he said he was. He even introduced the
interesting idea that anti-Semitism was okay if it
was a "sincerely held" anti-Semitism, and that such
a historian might not necessarily be a bad
historian.

It is a typical lawyers' argument, and I
would not have pleaded or argued that myself. Since
I am not anti-Semitic, I would not think of it. I
wish I had been looking at the faces of the German
journalists to see their reaction to Judge Gray's
interesting notion, however. (Julius
Streicher at Nuremberg: "Alright,
M'lud, I'll come clean, I was a Jew-baiter: but it
was sincere Jew-baiting!" "Acquit that man with
costs from the public purse!")

Rampton was livid about the Krema II "no
holes" -- I reminded the court once again that I
had twice stated the challenge: find the holes on
top of the roof of Leichenkeller 1 at Auschwitz,
and I will drop the action within 24 hours. They
have not tried, because they know I am right. This
time it sinks in to the whole courtroom. He was
also livid about the June 28 1943
Bischoff document on
Krematorium capacities; he says there remains only
one flaw in it, the missing "43"; this is quite
untrue. I stuck to my guns. The document in that
form is not genuine, and it is the only one I
challenged.

I omitted about 30% of the "global
conspiracy" material where it was hard to show
relevance. I omitted the remarks on
Professor Funke, as he
assured me they were untrue (and the Judge might
therefore have objected)[...].